Friday, April 14, 2006

Gap analysis

A nice debate ongoing at cricinfo Wicket to Wicket, on the dichotomy of Indian test and ODI performances. I'd hoped to write on this topic myself, but now I would wait to see if anything remains unsaid....and going by contributions so far, I find myself mostly agreeing with Dileep Premchandran's take. Btw, Prem is also scheduled to write on it, apparently. Do keep an eye on this one.

My own take - the test and ODI performance review for Chappell, already underlined the 'fact' that we as Indian fans, could hardly ask for more in ODIs, while our test team is still looking stagnated from the days of Wright, despite certain improvements (the 'fresh air' from Patel and Santh, as Dileep puts it), mainly due to the decline of strong forces of Sachin, Sehwag and, to some extent, VVS.

2 Comments:

Hi there! My own take on the disparity between our tests and ODIs performance is that we have not yet got the right combination of batsmen and bowlers for the tests. Sehwag's woefully out of form, VVS is kept out while Sachin's injured. As far as bowling's concerned, the less said the better, With too much experimenting, no one is allowed to settle down. We saw Sreesanth in one match, then R P Singh, then Munaf and now VRV Singh! The older bowlers like Agarkar, Zaheer and Nehra are nowhere in the picture, while Balaji's still out due to injury. We don't know who's going to play where in the team when! I feel that Chappell's concentrating solely on the WC 2007, bcoz his contract expires then. He feels if India perform decently there, his contract may be reviewed!

Yep...not enough consistency in selecting the playing XI - for me the first step is...get the 5/6 in-form batsman (based on how they shape in nets, camps etc) finalised and tell them that they will play the whole series. Also tell them where they stand, in their position in the team. Whether it is on line...whether they are a certainty for near future etc.